Books & Poetry
I Am A Man author talks about journalism students and new book
Web exclusive
The author of "I Am A Man": Chief Standing Bear's Journey of Justice talks with C&I about teaching journalism, making students cry, and being mistaken for an FBI plant. See the September issue of C&I for the rest of the interview and a review of his latest book.
Cowboys & Indians: You recently returned from a trip with your students to the Pine Ridge Reservation. What was the experience like for your students?
Joe Starita: We have a handpicked group of students that we have enrolled in a depth journalism class about the role Native women have played in history past, present, and future. We took the 13 students in the class and put them on the Pine Ridge Reservation for a week. I don't think I'm overstating it to say that it was a transcendent experience for these students. It was overwhelming to them that one piece of real estate could contain so many conflicting forces of culture and history in every square foot. Students from very wealthy suburbs of Omaha would burst into tears, and it was a very natural response for them to do that. Their time on the reservation provided a wholesale rearranging of what it means to have a tough day.
That is what education is all about. This is something that could not be replicated in a classroom: We could not describe to them what it is like to pull back the flap and enter a sweat lodge at 140 degrees, where it is so dark that it felt like you were at the bottom of Carlsbad Caverns, and be asked by the medicine man Alvin Slow Bear to state why you are thankful for where you are and who you are. None of these students had ever had to summon those thoughts before. I wondered, How are they going to explain this to their parents?
C&I: You spent a great deal of time on the Pine Ridge Reservation researching your first book, The Dull Knifes of Pine Ridge — A Lakota Odyssey. What drew you to Pine Ridge in the first place?
Starita: The Pine Ridge Reservation is the second largest reservation in the country, larger than the state of Delaware. It is also one of the most sparsely populated. It is a place I spent an inordinate amount of time while I was researching The Dull Knifes book. And I knew it would be a really good place to flesh out the texture and dimensions of this class that we are calling "Native Daughters." The students interviewed about 40 women on the reservation, including the female president of the Oglala Sioux tribe — one of the most warrior-based societies — Theresa Two Bowls. Students wept during the interview when she recounted the abuse she encountered during her first marriage. The most powerful woman of the Sioux tribe had these emotions and shared them with the students.
They interviewed traditional medicine women who used native herbs and plants to treat flu and diarrhea. They interviewed a 93-year-old woman who had lived in the Badlands and whose mother lived through the Battle of Wounded Knee in the summer of 1890. It was a rich experience, the net result of which will alter the trajectory of their lives to some degree — and that is the point.
C&I: What was your inspiration for telling the story of the Dull Knife family?
Starita: I had this idea of wanting to tell the story of what it has been like to be a Native American living in this country for the last 150 years. I thought the best way to do that would be to put five generations of one family on a cultural continuum and see how those generations each had to adapt to the dominant culture in order to survive. I took it from Chief Dull Knife around the time of the Battle of Little Big Horn and traced it to his son George Dull Knife who had a role in Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show. He could not be a real Indian, so he decided to travel from Rome to Paris to earn a living as a fake Indian.
And on to his son Guy Dull Knife Sr., who fought for his country in the trenches in World War I at a time when he could not be a citizen. He almost died in the war in 1917 but could not vote in his own country for another seven years. His son Guy Dull Knife Jr. walked point in Vietnam because his commanding officer thought an Indian could see movement up ahead better than anyone else. It was probably the most dangerous job in the world at that time — bamboo tiger pits, trip wires, explosives — and he got the job by virtue of being an Indian.
Joe Starita
C&I: How did you research the book?
Starita: I put a tent in the back of my Isuzu Trooper and drove the 500 miles from Lincoln, Nebraska, to the Pine Ridge Reservation. I would pitch a tent on [the Dull Knife family's] property and camp out for a week or two at a time. I literally spent thousands and thousands of hours with this family. It took a lot of hours simply to gain their trust, which I understood would be required from the get go. Historically when white people show up on the reservation asking a lot of questions, good things don't happen. I was prepared for skepticism and suspicion of who I was. Even after six months with the family Guy Dull Knife Jr.'s wife, Cora Yellow Elk, was convinced that I was an FBI plant or working undercover for the Fish & Wildlife Service, and they would wake up one day to flashing lights and be hauled away in handcuffs. She was not convinced that I would do what I said I would, which was to tell the story from their viewpoint, which has always been a problem when white people have tried to tell stories from a Native viewpoint. I wanted to tell it from the viewpoint of a chief who can either turn left and fight the government and watch his people die, or turn right and protect his people but watch his culture die. It is a difficult choice. I wanted to relay what their family saw and felt as they watched history unfold over the last two centuries.
C&I: Your latest book, "I Am A Man": Chief Standing Bear's Journey for Justice, is about a Ponca chief who ended up filing a federal lawsuit in 1879 in order to establish that he was a person under the law and had the right to return to his Nebraska homeland to bury his son without being arrested for leaving the government-assigned reservation. What led you to write this book?
Starita: To me, it is human nature to dig deeper than a good story line to find out about the people who shaped this country's history. Those people helped shape who we are both as individuals and as a country. There is almost an insatiable global appetite for the people, places, and events that shaped life west of the Mississippi. It is astonishing to me how little people know about one of the best stories that played out on the stage. Standing Bear walked out of his home with his son on his back — the story has a Biblical, Shakespearean sweep with blizzards and villains and death and redemption and guilt, and it's all true.
C&I: What surprised you most when you were researching the book?
Starita: I had no idea the depth and magnitude of the white reaction. I think we are all so inured or conditioned that when the forces of manifest destiny collided on the grand stage we call the West, we are conditioned to see the white man as a pillager, plunderer, rapist — take your pick. To find a story that turned that on its head, where white people emerged as heroes, that was the most interesting, the part I least expected and was most surprised by. Ultimately from the president of the United States, Rutherford Hayes, who looked at all the evidence and said this man has been screwed and I am going to right a wrong, who restored a part of the traditional homeland to the Ponca who wanted to return, it filters through U.S. senators, journalists, newspapers from Boston to Pittsburgh to Washington, D.C., to high-powered lawyers to church faithful — that was the single most astonishing thing. The magnitude of white people — men and women — who rallied around the Standing Bear flagpole for all the right reasons.
C&I: Is Standing Bear's story still relevant today?
Starita: To me this isn't a story that can be reduced to mothballs and neatly tucked away in the file drawer that says 19th-century America. It continues to resonate in the opening years of the 21st century. One of those lessons might be that if you looked at the U.S. government experience with the Native people in this country, it might not be possible to impose American democracy on these tribal-based societies that have existed that way for hundreds of years. We still haven't done that here. . . . There is another real interesting irony about what happened to Standing Bear in the 19th century. Standing Bear, without any question, would have been considered an enemy combatant of his time. And yet an American Indian in 1879, who was not a citizen — who a judge had to declare was a person — had access to a federal court. How can an enemy combatant in 1879 have access to the federal courts, when an enemy combatant today not only does not have access to the courts, but can be held for years without being charged? ... As someone who believes in the constitution and the rule of law, I don't understand that.
